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Hiring an KMS developer

Hey all,

A while ago Dave (David?) Airlie wrote on his blog about multiple X-servers on one graphics card. It was featured here, including a typical Phoronix headline. Dave, however, said it wasn't ready for normal users at all.

Anyway, as I'm not a C programmer I e-mailed him, asking him to continue his work and offering to temporarily hire him. Unfortunately, he didn't respond. Still, I would love to see two X-server on one graphics card working. Is there anyone who would like to continue his work? Or anyone I could try to contact to? Any idea how much this would cost me?

A moderately competent developer costs about $50/hour. The particularly good ones can and usually do command a good deal more.

I believe the KMS switching work, given the portions that are already implemented, has an absolute minimum one man-month of work to complete (remember, this must include hardware research, actual coding, documentation, and extensive testing): four weeks of full-time development. So that's a low-ball figure of 50*40*4 = $8,000.

If you hire a more qualified dev (like Dave Airlie) who is more likely to expect around $80/hour, and if you assume a more feasible two months of work, then you end up at around 80*40*8 = $25,600.

Unless you're a wealthy philanthroprist, paying for Open Source development is infeasible. There's a reason why just about every single successful Open Source project is heavily backed by a corporate entity, such as Red Hat or Novell or Oracle or AMD or VMWare or so on. Hobbyists very rarely develop quality software, competent developers aren't just floating around looking for short-term contracts, and money don't grow on trees.

A moderately competent developer costs about $50/hour. The particularly good ones can and usually do command a good deal more.

I believe the KMS switching work, given the portions that are already implemented, has an absolute minimum one man-month of work to complete (remember, this must include hardware research, actual coding, documentation, and extensive testing): four weeks of full-time development. So that's a low-ball figure of 50*40*4 = $8,000.

If you hire a more qualified dev (like Dave Airlie) who is more likely to expect around $80/hour, and if you assume a more feasible two months of work, then you end up at around 80*40*8 = $25,600.

Unless you're a wealthy philanthroprist, paying for Open Source development is infeasible. There's a reason why just about every single successful Open Source project is heavily backed by a corporate entity, such as Red Hat or Novell or Oracle or AMD or VMWare or so on. Hobbyists very rarely develop quality software, competent developers aren't just floating around looking for short-term contracts, and money don't grow on trees.

I think you are kind of low on those rates, a decent Jr programmer will pull in about $50 alone on much simpler tasks let alone someone like David on a much more complicated task.